Since today is Veteran’s Day, I decided to post this excerpt from my book, How I Survived the First Year~a mother’s journey of grief.  I am not trying to equate the experiences of another person’s grief with mine, for each one is different.  But loss and grief are universal. And if my grief can help me understand yours, even a little, then we are not so alone in our struggles.  We can hopefully support each other in our times of loss. And that is my goal.Thank you.Lora Marie Wade

Veteran’s Day

11/11/98

It’s Veteran’s Day.

Today I fought a new battle with my grieving soul.

Caught off guard by the confidence of my newly acquired peaceful feelings,

I fell into a land mine of newspaper articles,

buried under the mountain of my unsorted paperwork.

The words of the headlines,

“Fatal Crash”

“Driver drowns after car plunges into river,”

flew out at me,

raining like gunfire

on the battlefield of my basement office.

I am shell-shocked.

I had been recovering quite well, as of late.

But one cannot be ready for every sneak attack.

One cannot always be prepared for war.

It defeats the process of peace.

And, peace is what I’m after.

It is there.

It’s always there, yet so difficult to hang onto.

To keep.

The struggle to find it,

and then keep it alive,

continually reemerges to challenge me again and again.

The rawness of my grief is still so fresh,

like a soldier’s open wound in the field of combat.

I have something else in common with those veterans of war.

We have all survived,

but not unscathed.

And the suffering is not over.

We still search for the peace that will set us all free,

and lead us home,

for good.